HP's Martin Fink arguing for copyleft licenses

[Fabian Keil]

Nico Rikken <nico.rikken at fsfe.org> wrote:

> Great presentation, even when taking the pragmatic view. Apart from the
> community-statement, I'd like to highlight his statement that copyleft
> stimulates collaboration, whereas non-copyleft projects require
> committees and other bureaucratic organization-parts to avoid partners
> splitting off and doing their own thing, not contributing back as a
> result.
> 
> Quick URL to the video:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxIEDNyZOkA

Thanks for the link. Pure comedy gold.

Given how much proprietary software HP is peddling, I think it's in a
pretty poor position to lecture others about which free licenses they
should use.

Quoting a LWN comment from fredrik:
| So this anti-permissive rhetoric isn't in any way driven by any
| ambition by HP to commoditize software, by blocking any opportunity
| for proprietary extensions from competitors, on select markets to
| shift customer demand towards their own hardware on those markets?
|
| HP, please let me know when you have licensed Integrated Lights Out
| under the GPL. Oh, and the firmware for all those fine printers too.
| I've always wanted to fix the bug that stops my printer from using
| all of the ink in the cartridge. Go go GPL!
|
| Mr Flink also manage to conflates the Apache 2.0 license with the
| organizations that prefer to use said license.
https://lwn.net/Articles/660715/

If I understood Mr. Fink correctly, his argument is that HP does not
open source products like HPUX (explicitly mentioned in the talk)
because open source projects need a community to strive. Wait, what?

Mr. Fink also seems to knowingly conflate the Linux kernel with the free
software community in general, for example when he spreads the FUD about
DTrace and ZFS which according to him can't be used by "the community".

While the fact that they are licensed under the CDDL might be inconvenient
for GNU/Linux distributions, for various other operating systems it's not
a big deal and (from their point of view) even preferably to a more
restrictive license like the GPL.

In somewhat related news, when I try to get additional information about
OpenSwitch at http://www.openswitch.net/ I merely see an image of an
arrow and no actual text on the website.

Looking at the page sources, the page is trying (and failing) to execute
unsigned code on my system and the code does not seem to have a license header.

I hope the conference organizers can get Larry Ellison next year,
I'm sure he has similarly valuable insights about free software licenses.

Fabian
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